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A cartoon that was free to watch on YouTube the whole time it aired just made more than $37 million in movie theaters. The studio behind it, around 100 people in Sydney, paid for the entire thing by selling plushies and T-shirts. The Amazing Digital Circus ended this month after nine episodes and almost three years. No network paid for it, and no investor put in money. The studio, Glitch Productions, started in 2017 as two brothers animating in a family home in Sydney. Years earlier, one of them, Luke, had built a Super Mario fan channel called SMG4. It grew big enough to pay for the move into their own shows. Each episode cost up to $300,000 to make. Most of that money came from selling merchandise, plus ad revenue and a few government arts grants. The shows stayed free. Anyone could watch the whole series on YouTube without paying. Netflix started carrying the show in 2024, but the deal was unusual. New episodes still came out on YouTube first, for free, and Glitch kept full control of the story. Netflix could stream it but had no say in how it was made. By the end, the first episode alone had passed 440 million views, more people than live in the United States, and more than any other independent cartoon pilot on YouTube. The finale, called The Last Act, ran in cinemas first. It opened to $36.6 million worldwide and set new records for the company that put it in theaters, then went up free online two weeks later. Most cartoons get paid for by a studio and hidden behind a paywall, and the audience only shows up at the end. Glitch did it the other way around. The fans came first, the show stayed free, and the merchandise paid for everything else, including a finale that packed theaters around the world.

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